Live and Let Die

There is a particular cruelty in being ill in a way that nobody can see.

Crohn's disease is invisible until it is not. For over a decade it was my constant companion, a pain amplifier running in the background of everything. Every decision filtered through it. Every plan qualified by it. The medical establishment's verdict, repeated across multiple consultations over multiple years, was consistent: there is nothing wrong with you.

So you learn to manage it alone. You learn to hide it. You learn to say yes to things you know will cost you later, because the alternative is a life made smaller by something that officially does not exist.

That is the story of no. No, you cannot do that. No, you should not go there. No, your body will not allow it. A decade of no, some of it self-imposed, most of it enforced by pain and the quiet shame of an invisible illness in a world that requires you to look fine.

The First Time

I drove myself three miles to A&E.

I do not entirely know how. I was running on whatever the body produces when it has decided that this is the moment. I got through the doors, made it to the front desk on my hands and knees, and told them I did not feel too good.

That is a British understatement of some precision.

I woke up four weeks later. There were people around the bed. I did not know, at the time, that they had come to say goodbye. I found that out later. What I knew in that moment was that something had fundamentally changed. Not in a cinematic way. Not in a way I could articulate. Something had simply been rearranged.

The decade of no ended that day. Not immediately, not consciously. But the mechanism that had been running the nos started to lose its authority. I had been to the edge of the thing and come back, and the edge had not looked like anything I had been afraid of. What I had been afraid of, it turned out, was not dying. It was the years before the dying. The managed, diminished, qualified life.

That flipped. Completely and permanently.

Yes. Definitely. Count me in.

Not recklessness. Not the motivational poster version of a near-death experience. Just the quiet removal of a veto that had been running for too long.

Nine Years Later

The body has a memory.

Nine years after the first episode, the process repeated itself. Slower this time. More insidious. Necrosis is a word that sounds dramatic until you understand that it is actually very quiet. Being eaten from the inside out does not announce itself. It just proceeds.

I am five foot eight. I am built, as a rule, like someone who wears Armani because the shoulders require it. Thirteen stone is my natural weight. I went down to just under nine.

The doctors, again, were not alarmed. I had not eaten in over a month. I was not deemed ill enough to warrant urgent intervention. The system that was supposed to catch this had looked at me and decided I could wait.

A good surgeon, eventually. A new process. And then, through the kind of pattern recognition that does not come from textbooks but from having lived in a malfunctioning system for long enough to understand its rhythms, I found it.

Milk. Dairy. The slow silent killer. Not dramatic. Not a crisis. A quiet, cumulative poison that the system had been absorbing for years without identifying the source.

That was eighteen years ago. Not a single issue since.

What Rust Has To Do With Any Of This

Rust is the name of a language I chose for reasons that seemed, at the time, purely technical. Memory safety. Deterministic performance. No runtime hiding its failures from you. A compiler that refuses to let decay proceed unnoticed.

The slow oxidation of iron. A material that looks solid until the structural integrity is gone. That fails not in a moment but over time, quietly, from within.

I did not make that connection consciously when I named this blog. But it was there.

The systems I am building now are designed around a single principle: context cannot be allowed to decay silently. Truth has to be held with precision, with provenance, with an explicit record of what was known, when, and how certain the system was at the point of decision. Not because that is an interesting technical property. Because I have lived in systems, biological and institutional, that failed to do exactly that, and I know what the cost looks like.

The decade of no was a system failure. The two near-deaths were the production incidents. The eighteen years of health since are what happens when you find the actual source of the problem and remove it, rather than managing the symptoms indefinitely.

I build what I build because I understand, at a level that has nothing to do with architecture documents, what it costs when a system cannot tell you what it knows, when it knew it, and why it failed to act.

What Actually Changed

Not a philosophy. Not a framework. Just this:

The thing that had been saying no lost its authority the moment I stopped believing it had more information than I did.

The doctors had data. They did not have context. There is a difference, and the difference nearly killed me. Twice.

I have never since assumed that the loudest voice in the room is the most informed one. I have never since confused the absence of a diagnosis with the absence of a problem. And I have never, not once in eighteen years, believed that there is something I cannot do.

String theory, possibly. The physics of elliptical orbits, at a push. Everything else is negotiable.

Live and let die is not a philosophy of recklessness. It is a philosophy of precision. Know what is actually killing you. Remove it. Everything else is just noise you have been mistaking for signal.

That is also, as it happens, the founding principle of everything I build.